


The Boy Who Lived

by Ketch117



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: And yes this is a crossover, Magical society can work for you, Many tags and characters to be added, Meetings with cosmic forces go as well as you'd expect, Multi, The universe isn't playing by anyone elses rules
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-19 04:02:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14866229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ketch117/pseuds/Ketch117





	The Boy Who Lived

**Prologue**

The old wizard looked over the gameboard that hovered between him at Death. "You are not real." He said, with all the (considerable) conviction he could muster.

Sitting on his dark-cushioned, modest throne in his low, rambling castle in the most-distant corner of the sky where there were no stars to ruin the ambience, Death remained unconvinced. He shook his pale head and pommeled a little his opalescent temples and slightly pursed his lips, which were the color of violet grapes with the silvery bloom still on. "Come now, Merlin." Death replied, his voice shockingly deep and without inflection. "You are in no position to cast aspirations, or set the terms of reality. Afterall, you are dead."

The wizard touched the place where his heart should have been. There was no beat at all. His flesh was cool, and oddly numb and without feeling. He placed his hand over his lips. He did not breathe. He touched his wrist. There was no pulse. Merlin did not consider himself alarmist to concede that empirical evidence seemed to support what he had been told; that he was indeed dead. As he went through the motions of drawing an informed conclusion, a small fragment of knowledge awoke within him, prompted by the statement. Having remembered his life backwards, remembering things before he experienced them and gradually forgetting all but the most fundamental after they had occurred, now, at the end of his life, he found himself curiously like a blank slate, without anything to draw upon or measure against. He had died a long, long time ago, trying to save the world. He had died slowly deep beneath the earth, in great pain, with a kiss on his lips, and a lie in his heart. And for all that he had a vague impression that he would live again, it was undeniably a feeling, rather then anything substantial.

Beyond that, who could tell?

Merlin – that is what Death had called him. And well he might – that had been his name, when he had walked amongst the living and still had use for such a thing. He had not known that about himself, not until Death had addressed him by that name. Indeed, he could remember almost nothing else about himself, beyond a few faded impressions like old, precious manuscripts he didn't dare look at too closely in case the pressure of his gaze turned them to dust, but it was good to have a name once more. It was a beginning, something he could perhaps build on. Names, afterall, have power.

"Nonetheless," Merlin insisted, gently but firmly, folding his arms, "You are not real. And if I am indeed dead, which certainly seems to be the case, then it changes nothing of the essential facts."

Death raised a long, pale hand, and knuckled the hollow space below his eye and let out a long patient sigh that seemed to go on forever, for even the very least actions of Death had a little of eternity in them. Death’s movements seemed lethargic from across the room, slow, but that was only a trick of perspective, for they were of a scale that dwarfed comprehension. Death could move further in one single stride than a man could in an entire lifetime spent running. He dwarfed the entire world, perhaps the entire universe, which isn’t so large as many suppose. Had he always been so vast, or had humans fed him to grow so? A question Merlin couldn’t help but ask himself, and hoped he would never hear any answer. "I suppose that you are going to argue about the schematics of a reality that allows you to be dead and yet be aware of my existence and your own. You are one of those for whom there is no after-life, only a negation, a non-being."

"Not at all." Merlin replied, quite honestly, and not unnerved in the slightest. "I merely doubt the reality of this whole experience. It is possible I am mad, that I cannot trust either the evidence of my senses and perceptions or the fevered impressions my mind conjures. It is possible I am being deceived, or what appears to be happening is in fact misleading; many things are possible. Most of them seem more likely to me then this."

"You trust your perceived nature of reality more readily then the evidence of your own senses?" Death asked, his voice betraying no emotion once more. "Well you could try asking for clarification."

"If I cannot trust my own perceptions, my hearing included, then what good would that do?"

"Solipsism.” Death replied. “I understand that you wish to imagine things are other that they are. Living beings have been doing that since the world begun, inventing stories to explain every imaginable phenomenon. But the prosaic fact of the matter is that the universe doesn't deign to address their perspectives, much less give them weight – for those perspectives are just that, and nothing else." Death replied, with a vast coldness that nonetheless had a tiny seething in it. "You are here. All the cunning arguments you can voice will not change that simple reality, or your arguments of delusion alter the facts of the matter. What is, is. I am surprised that you, of all men, should be so unoriginal as to try and argue otherwise. You will find reality disinclined to bend."

Merlin decided not to rise to that, though he firmly disagreed. There was establishing your point of view, and then there was being a pedant. "Why am I here?" He asked. If he could not reason his way out of this, then he might as well go through with it, and see where it took him.

"You are in a place not dead, nor alive. And so you have an opportunity, to play the Great Game and decide the fate of the world." Death said, without intonation or melodrama, which Merlin thought was rather a shame, given a line like that. Merlin glanced down at the gameboard, which he didn’t recognize, then back up at Death again, thoughtfully.

“The Great Game?”

“So it is called.”

“Against you?”

“Who else?”

“With the fate of the world in balance?” He shook his head. “Indulge me a moment, if you don’t mind. We have time for that, don’t we?”

Death shrugged magnanimously. “What time you have is your property, to do with as you will.”

“Then let me say only that it is the fundamental question of ethics, indeed of morality – here I am, the perfect blank slate. With only ghosts of memories and knowledge without context, unsure if I even exist. I am taken by some power I do not understand and deposited in a physical situation which cannot not possibly be real, if what rationality I still remember has anything to say about it, and told to set myself in a struggle against an opponent I cannot possibly hope to best." The wizard looked Death in the eye. He was a skeptic by nature, a surprising number of wizards are. "Should I fail, I will likely cease to exist, and the world - the real world - will be destroyed because my failing proves that it lacks the strength to survive.”

“As fair a way to look at the situation as any, I suppose.”

“Well what if I refuse? What if I refuse to dignify this, refuse to believe it, refuse to indulge you and play your game? What if I deny you the satisfaction of an opponent? What then?”

 “Then you do nothing. And the game continues.”

“And would that be courageous or cowardly? Some would argue that defying you here and now is the final victory of the human spirit.”

“Inaction is as much a choice as any other, and valid, in it’s way.” Death said, with a ponderous shrug. “Decisions about obligation, responsibility to your fellow man and to existence as a whole is up to you.”

Merlin considered what Death had revealed as he considered Death himself. Either it was, or it had taken the form of a tall man, very pale of skin, so fleshless as to be almost skeletal. His face was a pale oval, around which he was robed in midnight, as though some hand had carefully selected some starless corner of the night sky and somehow woven it into a fabric. Around his waist was a black belt, set with silver skulls tarnished almost as black, from which hung his irresistible scythe. His nails were black. His teeth were black. His eyes were so dark they seemed to deaden and dull the light of the rest of the place where Merlin had found himself, muting things to monochrome twilight greys. And his face was unencumbered by care or worry or anything else whatsoever. Contrary to rumor, Death was not cruel, but neither was he kindly or much given to compassion. He simply was.

And Death considered Merlin as he himself was considered, as was always the way of things, for when you stare into the Abyss, even only a glimpse, the abyss stares into you. Of course, Death did not see as a mortal did, he saw instead the thread of destiny that spelled out the lonely path the wizard had followed from cradle to grave (if he'd ever got one). He saw every step, every thought, every failure and every triumph, every beat of the heart and breath on the wind, the whole tangled web of events and decisions far more clearly then he saw the man. But he considered the man as well.

Merlin was as he'd always been. His clothes looked white at first glance, but probably never had been, the coarse greyish sackcloth was more a stone-washed bluish-grey then anything. He was barefoot, but it was not the pastoral, sentimental closeness to nature many such men felt. He was simply a man who went barefoot because he didn't think it was worth wasting time making shoes. He wore a luxuriant white beard, long enough to tuck in his belt, and though it was empty now when he’d lived he had worn jewels and it had shone, but it was his eyes that Death considered the longest, deep, red glowing things, like two coals from some unearthly forge, burning orbs that no earthly power could perish or quench. He resembled his mother, but he had his Father's eyes.

"That's not really an answer."

“Very well.” Death replied. “Asserting that anyone could in any way define the limits of possibility entirely through the lens of his own experiences to the point that they disregard anything outside them is a logical fallacy all on it’s own. But disregarding that, humans are more then the sum total of their subjective selves, whatever they chose to believe the world shall continue as it wishes, untainted by their perceptions. _No man is an island entire of itself_ ; _every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main_ _._ ” Death said, the quote sailing over Merlin’s head. The poet John Donne was a little past his time.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find the ultimate reality – mankind’s own mortality, is an objectivist.” Merlin muttered. Death didn’t laugh – though it wasn’t much of a joke.

“Any belief that puts itself beyond doubt nurtures its own collapse.” Death added, since it seemed debate was the order of the day. “Convictions are tools for interpreting the world, not defining it.”

“Fairly said.” Merlin conceded. At last Merlin's attention wandered from the grim spectre, and now he studied the game in question, since it seemed there was no getting out of it. It was not one he was familiar with, but he was sure he’d be able to reason it out. The game was just as important as his opponent, more, perhaps. It looked something like chess, or at least it was more like chess than it resembled any other game he had seen, but was played on a larger and infinitely more complex board, ten by twelve spaces.

It was hard to tell the board's true size. Given his own dimensions compared with Death’s, they must have been strange indeed. It was a construct of scope and subtlety at once beyond any magic he’d ever witnessed, but that was besides the point – the principle was familiar to him - the idea was to preserve his pieces, and trap or remove his opponents.

As above, so below, his logic and reason concurred. What we change here, we change in the real world – regardless of whether _here_ even exists. This map not only represented the land, it actually _was_ the landscape. It was beyond any earthly magic. But then, his wits were not balanced against any earthly force, but against Death itself. Death, by the strict code no other being understood, had engineered this place, and drawn him into it for reasons that did not entirely seem clear, but for stakes that were very real – further arguing the point would be wasting both of their time. And his instincts warned him that time was too precious to waste.

The game was already in progress - it would not be a stretch to say it was in its closing stages. The pieces in play – and there were at once thousands of them and only a handful, however that worked - were crude, and intentionally so, as though they had been carved by someone with only the vaguest idea of what it was they were trying to create, and was none to skilled at the act of creation besides. Each was indistinct, hinting at rather then showing, with faint impressions of features and limbs. They could generously - and with a little imagination - be construed to represent mortals and immortals, monsters and heroes, warriors and demi-gods, emperors and fools, elves and queens, vampires and wizards, demons and dragons and scientists and alchemists and pawns and thieves and everything else imaginable. Many hundreds of them stood in long rows beside the board in silent vigil, removed by the effect of earlier moves. Just as the squares represented real places, the pieces represented real people.

Death's pieces were carved (of course) from bone ivory. His own pieces were made of moon-silver. Many more of his than of Death's were gone - it was obvious even to the most cursory inspection by someone with no idea of the rules that he was losing, and badly. In the centre was a single coloured object that neither of them seemed to control, a red stone fist, and unlike the other figures it had been modeled in perfect exactitude. But for the moment, the function of that escaped him, and it seemed like the least of his concerns.

He knew without needing to be told it was very important that he won. If he failed here, his world fell too and his entire life, and the lives of all those he had ever cared for had been lived in vain. He opened his mouth to ask the terms of the game, the rules it followed and decided it was pointless before he made so much as a sound. Death was his opponent, asking him for assistance was foolish beyond measure. All the same, his winning seemed unlikely. For a moment, the futility of his position filled him to the brim, followed by a kind of hopelessness. He was more a philosopher then a strategist. Certainly no player. Not in the way King Arthur Pendragon had been.

Arthur. That was a name he had not forgotten, a name more important then his own had ever been. He had been with Arthur when he died, he was sure, and while he had no memories or evidence to vouch for this assumption, it felt so right he did not question it in the slightest. He had died himself shortly thereafter. He remembered that, just as he remembered the bastard son of a king who had been far more than a son to him. Upon Arthur he had laid all his hopes, and Arthur had risen to the occasion. Arthur was why he was here. Or perhaps there was something else entirely he did not remember. He was not sure, but he knew it was as well to question all of his assumptions here.

"You are considering your move."

"No. I am remembering Arthur Pendragon."

Death seemed to smile, if you could call a twitch of lips and a flash of teeth a smile. It was the first glimmer of emotion he'd shown (excepting that momentary flash of impatience or irritation) since Merlin found himself in his presence. "He was my greatest servant."

Even lacking all the knowledge that made him who he was, Merlin sensed the lie in that. "He was never your servant."

"His sword knew little rest in his life. He was always a warrior, and there was always another battle to fight, always more enemies to send my way. A lifetime of war benefits only myself. He killed his friends. He killed his family. He killed and he killed and he killed, even with his last breath."

"He was a slave to no ideals but his own, and killed only when he had no honourable alternative."

"Perhaps you are right." said Death, as if it didn't really matter. "Let me rather say that his aims and mine coincided for a time."

Again, Merlin found he did not have the energy to argue. Death picked up the piece that Merlin recognised at once as representing King Arthur from where it lay beside the board. It was old now, marked by age, it's surface rubbed away in places. It might have been tarnished silver, and then again it might have been grubby ivory. It was difficult to tell.

"He was a very great killer." said Death, without reminiscence, as though simply stating a fact as he rolled the piece between his long fingers, through some trick of perspective. "I have rarely seen his equal. Perhaps I shall see him again, in time, but for now he sleeps on - his name is not written in the Book of Dust, The Book of Blood or the Book of Glory."

“Is mine?”

“Now that,” Death said softly “would be for me to know, and for you to find out.”

Merlin had no answer for that, and resisted the impulse to allow himself to be provoked, and the stronger urge to be drawn into discussion. He had always relished a debate on any subject, numbers, natural philosophy, religion. But it was not the time. Instead, he again studied the game. This was all part of a pattern, he told himself, and he needed to understand it, as he needed to understand what was happening to him. Before you can rule others, you must rule yourself. That is the first, and the most important, lesson in mastering magic – purists would say the only one that mattered.

Looking down at the board, he thought hard about what he saw, carefully considering each piece, what it represented, and what purpose it served. There was no instruction or advice, but nonetheless he slowly found himself getting a feel for just how desperate the situation was. He stared in turn at each of the pieces he commanded, hemmed in and surrounded, in danger of being crushed. Across Britain, the shadow of chaos had fallen, though most were unaware. There was a secret war, covert and hidden, that had flared up once more.

With startling insight, despite the world having changed so fundamentally from the one he had left that any coherent picture should have been completely incomprehensible, Merlin began to piece it together, without any real frame of reference - not even his own vast reservoirs of experience - to work with. And wherever Merlin's gaze fell, all was disruption and roaring anguish, terror at the unknown, the violence that grew in scope and magnitude for every fresh victim it claimed. A Dark Lord had arisen in Britain, and sought to dominate it to his will and shape it in his own, twisted image. This game was as much a battle of ideologies as it was of force of arms. That much, at least, was clear.

It was that point exactly that Merlin realised he was beginning to figure out the rules. Most of the pieces didn't matter, not in the scheme of things. The challenge was not to end the game, because the only end to the game was in the favour of his opponent. Death's pieces seemed insurmountable when taken as one, but individually, flaws and cracks began to emerge. Incidentally it was also when he began to accept the circumstances of his existence here, at least subconsciously. Voldemort headed the coalition arrayed against him, the leader the dear and dreadful things had rallied behind, whose cause they had taken as their own. Though many of his servants were more terrible then he, Voldemort had drawn them together, given them common purpose and direction. Merlin sought out his piece, and a moment later found it. Glancing at it, he saw, with clarity, exactly what it was the piece represented. 

He was not mad, as a man is mad. He had dwelt apart from humanity so long that he was no longer human. Merlin saw the tautness of his body, as though his flesh and soul had been stretched and twisted like a fraying rope on the verge of snapping. Staring, hypnotic eyes, hideously weak. A creature thoroughly out of it's depth, fascinated by it's own luck, it's own rise from obscurity, it's successful dalliance with oblivion. He saw confidence born of ignorance, too audacious to fear failure, too obsessed with power to recognise consequences, a desire for power without any inhibitions or control, a wild, hysterical desperation that leant him mad strength. A fear of death so all-consuming it had almost become love, as slaves can learn to love the lash. Merlin looked away. He knew from a glance, without a doubt, that Voldemort could destroy the world. It was then that he firmly accepted the reality of the situation, that he accepted that this was not some illusion or trick, that his imprisonment had not driven him mad.

But Voldemort was not what concerned him. The Dark Arts were many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them was like fighting a many-headed monster which, every time a neck was severed, spouted a head even fiercer and cleverer then before. Fighting the Dark Arts was opposing that which was unfixed, mutating, fluid and indestructible. Merlin had believed these things to be cyclic, he remembered, that each generation endured the same trials, birthed the same rough beasts to torment themselves, and this all but confirmed it. And so he wouldn't play to win. Winning was an illusion, a distraction. Instead, he would play not to lose.

"Are you going to move?" Death asked. "Need I remind you that we are playing to a time limit, and you forfeit the game if we do not finish before the sands of time run out?"

Death indicated an hourglass besides the table. The sands were already almost half gone. Merlin could not remember it being there before. Perhaps Death's gesture had called it into being.

"It seems to me that all the rules are stacked firmly in your favour." Merlin said conversationally. "You have every possible advantage, as far as I can tell."

"If you do not like the game, why did you agree to play?"

That was a good question. Why had he decided, despite his doubts, to be sitting here, playing an unbeatable opponent at a game he had no hope of winning?

"I had no choice." he said at last. "Nothing that lives does."

"You had a choice." said Death. "You least of anyone can claim you were forced into this. Existence is a choice, not an accident."

Merlin reclaimed another portion of his memory. The board was of Britain, of the land he had tried to build with Arthur, a representation of all he had dreamed. A land that he had interfered with, that's destiny he had tried to shape. Though the chain of causality was far removed, perhaps this was all his doing. Contained within that truth was another one, a truth he was not yet prepared to face. It was still too terrible to contemplate.

To distract himself, Merlin picked up one of his pieces, more or less at random. It suggested either a man or a woman, he couldn't be sure, and was carved of moon-silver. The crest of the house of Peverell was inscribed on the base, the symbol composed of a few scratchings that suggested an eye within a pyramid. A symbol used at many times, by many manner of men.

As he touched the piece, he recalled other things. He had spoken to this piece before, not so long ago, indirect though it was. The details escaped him, but he recalled a consciousness, awareness of his body that had long since become part of a tree. He had spoken to them about magic, the fate of the world, and secret's long hidden that had become important once more. Had he been a ghost, perhaps? He couldn't say with any confidence one way or another.

He knew then how he could influence events and where. He could sense those he touched, and close to the things he had created. With this one there was something else. This one had studied Merlin's work, had deciphered it's patterns and held them in it's mind. This had set up the merest flicker of resonance of sympathetic magic between them, a connection he could use.

"You have touched the piece, do you intend to move it?" Death asked politely.

Indecisively, Merlin returned the piece to the board. "No. Not yet."

"Waste all the time you wish. But the sands turn back for nobody."

So many years he had walked the earth, so many he had waited forgotten, and now he had no time. Merlin glanced at Death again, and the powers arrayed against him. The Dark Lord was menacing enough on it's own, but it was hardly the only General in the vast army arrayed on the board in bone ivory, nor was it the equal of pieces that had not yet marched upon the board, or many that had left the board for a time, but awaited the chance to return. He spared them little thought. What was on the board was bad enough. Terrible as Voldemort was, he magnified the terror of many other, worse things. How was it that the forces arrayed against life had all grown stronger as he had grown weaker?

It was not a matter of power, he told himself. It was a matter of intelligence and strategy and the ability to think ahead. Even there he was at a disadvantage. Who had ever out-thought Death itself?

But there was nothing to be gained complaining. Some things simply had to be done. He gathered the tattered remnants of his once near immeasurable strength to him and raised the piece he had touched before from the board. Once, it was said, one of those whom that family were descended had bested Death, if only for a little while. And now he must find some way to repeat that feat.

Merlin was not a storyteller himself, but his gift for words and the subtleties of speech came from the same place – an understanding of the human condition, the human heart, and if there was one thing he considered himself an expert upon, it was humanity. He understood the gift how storytellers taught themselves to stand outside their own lives, contenting themselves to scribbling their accumulated elucidations and imaginings in lieu of having to participate.

Bit though he did not possess the talent, Merlin saw things with double vision and distance that a storyteller might envy. He saw the here and now, but he also saw the story being played out and the characters, the roles they played out, and he pitied them. He knew what was coming, what he would have to do, and he pitied himself.

"Come then, oh Ender of Worlds." Merlin said, placing the first of his chosen champions confidently and decisively into his new position, and ignoring the faint shudder of self-disgust that rose within him as he did. "Let us play."


End file.
